2 PCMCIA cards in one laptop. Help please...

Hi, I have 2 Linksys Etherfast PCMCIA cards. Im trying to use my Laptop as an IPMASQ server. My Linux distribution is redhat 6.2. My laptop is an HP Omnibook 4000 CT with a 486 50 mhz with 16 mb of RAM and a 503 MB HD. I can't get both PCMCIA cards to work at the same time. If I pull one out, the other works and I can switch them so the other works. ifconfig reports that both cards have different IRQs.When I
do ifconfig while both cards are in, it shows that they are both running. My test to see if they are both working is: while both cards are in laptop, ping local IPs with one card attached to a LAN cable. Then switch LAN cable to other card. The IPs I gave the PCMCIA cards were both 192.168.0.x/24. I'm sure that it is possible to do this, but I'm not sure how. My current IPMASQ server has 2 Linksys etherfast NICs. I didn't need to do a special config, but things are probably
different with PCMCIA. Also, how can I set an ethernet card's hardware address so that it boots with the same set hardware address everytime? I know how to set the harware address for the card, but after rebooting, it goes back to its default address( this is normal, but I need to know how and where to put the script to make it boot with a different hardware address).If you can, please email me your information as I don't surf the web often, only check email.

This situation is specifically covered in the HOWTO, in the section on
installation and configuration problems. You may just have an
interrupt conflict with whatever irq the second card is getting.
However, I'm a little concerned by how you say you're testing this
setup. You cannot test a two-network-card setup by just unplugging
the cable from one card and connecting it to the other card. The
kernel has a static table of routing information, and if it is routing
a given address to one interface, it isn't going to decide to use the
other interface just because the cable moved.
You say you configured both cards as 192.168.0.x/24, so they are on
the same subnet. The route for the 192.168.0.x network is going to
have to point to one interface or the other: it can't point to both.
To test as you describe, when you move the cable, you would also need
to update the network routing to re-route addresses on this subnet to
the newly connected interface.
You do say you already have an IPMASQ server set up, so you must have
gotten two cards configured properly on that system.
To override a card's hardware address, which should almost never be
necessary, you could put an appropriate "ifconfig" command in the
start_fn() definition in /etc/pcmcia/network.opts.
-- Dave

Setting the MAC address of any card to another value is no problem. I posted a way to do this from your network.opts easily by changing David's network script slightly. This way you can change any MAC address by setting a variable in any of the "case" clauses in config.opts (for example based on the slot you put your PCMCIA card in.